


Scars

by TippenFunkaport



Series: SPOP Missing Scenes [5]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, F/M, Feelings, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Glimbow, Glimbow Centric, Healing, Missing Scene, Pulse - Freeform, Scars, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018) Season 4 Spoilers, Touching, Tumblr: Glimbow Week, glow - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26335573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TippenFunkaport/pseuds/TippenFunkaport
Summary: Bow is all healed from the Pulse bot but there are still a lot of open wounds between him and Glimmer.Set during Season 4, after the events of Pulse.For the Glimbow Week Prompt: Cuddling / Touch
Relationships: Bow/Glimmer (She-Ra)
Series: SPOP Missing Scenes [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1877965
Comments: 7
Kudos: 56
Collections: Glimbow Week 2020





	Scars

Someone was here. Bow woke with the feeling that he was being watched. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, especially since the list of people who could teleport into his bedroom in the middle of the night was very short, but it was still strange.

A soft magic hum and the inside of his eyelids glowed pink. Very short list of people who could do that too. He cracked one eye open and saw his best friend watching him, a handful of pink light at the end of her arm.

“Hi, Glimmer.” Bow’s voice sounded groggy but, in his defense, he’d been sleeping. His entire body still felt like it was made of lead and that weird magic buzzing hadn’t stopped, though thankfully it was quieter than it had been earlier today.

Almost dying was exhausting.

“Bow?” Glimmer sat alongside him on the edge of his bed. She was in her pajamas, the pale purple nightgown with little blue moons all over it. What time even was it? From what he could see of the sky from here, somewhere around the middle of the night. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No,” Bow lied because she was already being so hard on herself over everything that happened today, he didn’t want to add to it. He rubbed his face with both hands to try to get some kind of coherent thoughts going and propped himself up on his elbow. “What’s up? Is something wrong?”

“No. I just couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about...” Her voice caught and she turned away from him. He watched her silhouette against the pale pink light in her hand. “You don’t know what you looked like when they brought you in. I thought you were dead. The healers said you were as good as and if She-Ra hadn’t been there to do the whole magic thing, I don’t know what...” She took a shaky breath and he watched her shoulders rise and fall. “I’m sorry to come bursting in here in the middle of the night. I just needed to see you for myself and make sure you were really...” She shook her head and the sparkles in her hair caught the light.

“Glimmer, I told you to stop worrying about me! I’m fine.” It would have been a more effective statement if the muscles in his arms hadn’t decided just then that that was enough sitting up. They quit and he fell rather gracelessly back down on his back.

Yes. Laying down. Not moving. Now those were good ideas.

Glimmer shifted so she was closer to his head, her face scrunched with concern.

“I can’t! After what happened with the portal and then my mom and everything and now you...” She wiped her eye with her free hand. He put a hand on her knee because it was the closest part he had the energy to reach. “I don’t know. I felt so optimistic about everything before. I took out all those bots. I found the Horde’s hidden base. I made Catra pay for hurting you, though not as much as I would have liked.”

She clenched her free hand, her jaw set, and it was like he didn’t even recognize her. The thought stabbed right through him like a physical pain. And she’d used that tone again. That ruthless one that scared the crap out of him.

Turned out Queen Glimmer took a lot more getting used to than he’d thought.

But then she relaxed her hand, and her face softened. Just like that, she was his Glimmer again, like the other one had never been there at all. Except she had, and he couldn’t just forget.

If she was aware of the shift, she didn’t show it. “It felt like we were winning for a change, you know? But now that the high has worn off, it’s like... barely anything compared to all the battles we’ve still got left to fight.”

She sighed, and he rubbed his thumb against her knee, the soft material of her nightgown bunching under his touch. He didn’t say that he wished she hadn’t risked her life to avenge him or whatever. Or that she shouldn’t have gone off on her own like that without telling anyone. Or how could she have basically used Adora as bait? He didn’t say anything at all. It was all still an open wound, and it just hurt too much to keep poking at it.

Glimmer exhaled and then smiled at him in the dim light of her magic. “I wish you could have seen me do sorcery, though. It felt so amazing, Bow! I wish I could explain it. I was connecting to this part of me I didn’t even know I had. Like I got some of my dad back, if that makes sense. And Shadow Weaver said I’m really powerful, maybe almost as powerful as he was, and I kept thinking, I just wish he knew, you know? And here I was, the weakest princess for sooo long and the whole time I had all this extra power I didn’t even know about. Can you imagine? I could be the one to finally end this war!”

Her eyes sparkled at the idea. But how could she trust Shadow Weaver? Did she forget how that woman had tortured her? How she’d almost drained her? Because he sure hadn’t! And did everything Shadow Weaver had done to Adora count for nothing? Why couldn’t she just ask her aunt to teach her sorcery if she wanted to learn it so badly?

Bow opened his mouth and then closed it again. She looked so happy. So little made her happy these days. Besides, he and Adora had already tried earlier, during the world’s most awkward victory cake. Another gaping open wound.

He forced a smile and the way she grinned back at him made it almost worth it.

“Hey, can I show you something?” he said, to change the subject more than anything. Glimmer cocked her head at him and he flipped over his hand so his palm faced up. “Feel my hand.”

Glimmer looked skeptical, but she reached down and touched his palm. She gasped as her fingers traced the new skin. “It’s so soft!”

“Yeah. Weird, right? When She-Ra healed me it fixed, like, everything. No more archer’s calluses.”

“Aw, you worked so hard to build those up!” She was sliding her thumb across his fingertips, feeling the super soft skin there almost exactly as he’d done when he first noticed. First time ever her hands were rougher than his.

“Eh, they’ll be back soon enough.” He didn’t add that it was going to hurt like hell to shoot for a while. He’d been building up those calluses on his hands for years, since he’d started teaching himself to shoot. But still... “Beats being dead.”

“Definitely.” Glimmer lifted his palm and put it against her face. She made a happy humming sound as she rubbed her cheek against the new soft skin.

He laughed. “Are you purring?”

“It feels nice.” She brought his hand back down to her lap and held it in hers. “Do you know that was one of the first things that made me realize something was wrong in the portal? Your hands didn’t feel right. These are my historian Bow’s hands.”

“Yeah?” That was kind of strange to think about. The portal had put him in the exact future he’d spent most of his life dreading. His dads may know the truth of who he was now, but that pain had been raw for so long. There was still an old ache there. But he did kind of like that Glimmer apparently felt possessive about that version of him. “I think the magic’s still in me fixing stuff and that’s why I’m so tired. There’s like this buzz? It was loud before, but now it’s quiet enough that I can almost forget about it.”

Glimmer paused, thinking. “Wait. When you say it healed everything—”

“Yup.” He knew what she was going to do before she did it, but it still tickled when she trailed her fingers under the bicep on his left arm. “It’s gone. All my scars are.”

It was one of his oldest scars, one she’d given him accidentally. She’d still been learning how to use her powers and had sparkle-burned him instead of teleporting him out of the fight like she’d been trying to. One of hundreds of ways a life in the rebellion had marked his body. All undone in a single afternoon.

Glimmer slid her fingers up and down his arm, shaking her head. It actually felt really nice. “It’s... I mean, it’s good, right? You’re all brand new.”

“But it’s weird too.”

“Yeah.” Her fingers lingered on the spot where the sparkle scar had been. “I’ll never forget that day.”

Neither would he. She’d felt so guilty about that for years, even though he hadn’t cared. She used to touch it all the time, trying to convince herself it was fading. And now it was completely gone. Like it had never happened.

Except not really.

She was trailing her fingers down his other arm now. “The big one from that transport door. That horrible ragged one from that horned jerk with the weird spear. Then there was that one up here... did we ever figure out what that was from?”

“No. Not a clue.” He twitched when her fingers slid across his abs. She’d touched him there before, they’d grabbed each other so many times in battle they’d pretty much covered it all, but this was different. He knew she was only feeling the newly healed skin, looking for familiar battle scars that weren’t there anymore, but, for some reason, he flushed and swallowed. They shared a look and some awkward laughter.

“Sorry. Is it weird that I’m, like, feeling you up right now?” She pulled her hand back. He immediately missed the contact.

“If it was anyone else, probably a little weird, yeah. But you’re good.” He grinned at her and she smiled back but didn’t replace her hand. He almost pointed out there used to be scars on his chest too if she wanted to touch that. Their eyes met and there was this kind of confusing fluttering feeling in his middle until Glimmer looked away.

What was that about? Did he say something wrong? Was the fact that this wasn’t weird... itself weird?

With a flick of her wrist, Glimmer extinguished the pink light and lay down next to him. He tried to shift over as best as he could, but his bed wasn’t nearly as big as hers and they barely both fit. She linked her arm around his middle and hugged herself closer. He moved his arm under her head and she sighed into his shoulder.

No, this wasn’t weird. It couldn’t be. It felt too right. It was just totally normal best friends stuff, and they were both tired after a crazy day. A crazy lifetime.

That fluttery feeling started up again, and he ignored it. Maybe it was still just leftover healing magic or whatever. Something was definitely still dragging at him. It was so perfectly warm and comfortable right now, he could barely keep his eyes open.

“Can I stay here with you tonight?” Her voice was small.

Bow hesitated. It wasn’t that he minded her sleeping over—they’d been doing that their whole lives and more than ever since her mom died—but in all those sleepovers she’d actually never slept in his bed before. That felt like... he didn’t even know. Something different. But what was the difference, really? Besides, it wasn’t like he was in any state to move even if she teleported them. “Uh, yeah. Sure.”

She’d started tracing her fingers against his arm again. He didn’t think about whether it was OK that he liked it. He closed his eyes. The comforting rhythm of it was reminding him how tired he was.

He was almost asleep when she asked, “What do you think Historian Bow would be doing right now?”

“Sleeping.”

She laughed against his shoulder and he smiled without opening his eyes. “You don’t think his Glimmer comes to annoy him in the middle of the night?”

“She might.” He tried to picture what it would be like to be that version of them, two kids who’d never been soldiers because there had never been a war. A Bow who hadn’t needed magic to bring him back from the dead today because his whole world was books and scrolls. A Glimmer who’d never been crushed by loss or tortured by dark magic. Two people who still recognized each other. No scars or open wounds. “I don’t really know.”

Everything was cozy and foggy and he tried to fight sleep for a minute so he could enjoy this. After all the pain of the last few weeks, it was nice to pretend that this meant that it was all healed between them. That tomorrow they could talk about anything again without wounding each other.

If only they could just stay like this, soft and safe, and not have to go back out there to get cut all over again.

Glimmer yawned. “Imagine if we could do this for all of Etheria. The entire planet wakes up one day brand new? No more war. What would you do?”

His brain was slow and sleepy and he couldn’t think of anything to say. What would he do? This. This is all I’d do. Her hair was soft against his neck and he turned so his head was resting atop hers.

“Goodnight, Bow.”

He wasn’t sure if he actually answered her or just thought about answering her before he started slipping into dreams of what it would be like. Everything getting better before it got worse instead of the other way around. Impossible wishes and magic fixes he knew weren’t real, even in dreams. All the pain gone, inside and out.

Thing was, he still remembered how much every one one of those scars had hurt.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always hugely appreciated no matter how long after posting it is!
> 
> Visit my Tumblr for asks, fic updates and misc thoughts. [https://tippenfunkaport.tumblr.com](https://tippenfunkaport.tumblr.com/)


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